The Harvest
by Energeia
Summary: He fell in love. The next day, they went to war. Obito/Rin. AU.
1. Summer

**Summer**

We were in the training grounds when Chiyome-sensei came in, followed by a new girl not yet in uniform. We'd been chucking knives half-heartedly at the target posts; but the moment she came in, we paused, our lazy shoulders drooping even lower. In every face, there was a pair of eyes. And in every pair of eyes was a miniature figurine of the new girl. There she was with her arms tucked behind her back, rosy cheeks marked with vibrant purple.

"Hi, I'm Rin," she greeted cheerfully before blushing and ducking her head. Chiyome-sensei came forward to scold us, but our eyes were remained on her. She peeked another glance at us and smiled.

She smiled often.

Chiyome-sensei had told us stories of how the Shodaime had wooed Mito Uzumaki by growing her a green garden filled with fragrant flowers and luscious fruits. At the center of this garden stood the first Hashirama tree, tall and sturdy to provide relief from the sun. Legend had it that the Moon Goddess herself was so moved by the Shodaime's love that she had shed a single tear upon the tree, granting it an eternal harvest. And so it was known that the Village Hidden in the Leaves was grown by the love shared between Mito and Hashirama.

These were only stories told by an elderly teacher with a fondness for romantic poetry. We knew that. Perhaps the moon watching over us at night wasn't a compassionate goddess, but only a distant rock floating in space. Perhaps the eternal tree had withered and died a long time ago. But maybe there was some kernel of truth to be unearthed from the legend. For all the Shodaime's power, there must have been some possibility that he'd created a garden hidden from the battlegrounds and the villages, from violence and greed.

Some even claimed to have discovered the Shodaime's garden. They claimed that it appeared only on the night of the full moon, that it would vanish at the mere spectre of conflict, that it would melt into the ground if someone were to approach with the intent to steal.

Whatever the case, stories had taught us that love was announced with a thunderclap and a jolt of lightning to the heart. These stories had taught us that love was passionate and as fiery as Mito Uzumaki's hair. These stories had taught us that love was enduring and greater than life.

But for many of us, it was a seed that fell through the slightest crack and took root, nurtured by smiles and shy glances, eventually growing into something simple but sturdy: a common weed.

Perpetually tardy, Obito was a late bloomer. Perpetually forgetful, Obito lost his goggles near the river. She was there on a hot summer day, gathering cattails to grind into poultices.

"Hello," she greeted cheerfully as he approached. She was wearing a thin camisole and kneeling among the rushes. Her hair clung to her nape. On her bare shoulders were little drops of perspiration.

"Hi," Obito managed to choke, rubbing his neck. He didn't _really_ need his goggles, he decided. In a marvelous display of grace and coordination, he stumbled backwards and quite rudely introduced his rear to the ground. He winced belatedly, blushing in anticipation of laughter. But she came closer, hovering over him and offering a hand.

"Are you okay?" she asked. Behind her, the vibrant strokes of sunset reflected off the glimmering water. The sweet scent of lavender emanated from the sachet tucked in her apron.

After a moment, he decided, "No."

She smiled and knelt by his side. "You're Obito, aren't you?"

He nodded distractedly; her knees were burning two holes into his side.

"I'm Rin," she said as her hands came alive with the same gentle, green light he had seen many times before in the classroom, the training grounds, in little pockets of space around the village as she attended to anyone and anything without prejudice. He knew exactly who she was.

"Yeah. I-we were in the same class."

She hummed as her calloused hands skimmed over his bare calf, leaving behind a trail of goosebumps. "I'm not an Inuzuka," she remarked at length. "Nohara. That's my family name, wherever they are." He nodded. He knew that too.

They were so close together, their proximity illuminated by her chakra under the curtain of her hair. It was almost like they were underwater. She touched her cheeks lightly with the pads of her glowing fingers. "An accident."

"What happened?" he asked, pushing himself up on his elbows. He'd never been this close to a girl. From his position, he could see the fine cracks in her dry lips. He wanted to move closer; he wanted to escape. In the end, he was paralyzed by indecision.

She smiled, eyes downcast. Silence stretched between them. For every passing moment, Obito grew redder and more anxious. _Why,_ he hadn't he just kept his mouth shut? It was all going so terribly. His favorite hobby was daydreaming about their meeting, making her laugh, making her fall for him. But now that they were together in reality, he didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to say.

He was just about to apologize when she finally replied, "Do you remember those chipmunks near the Academy?"

"I'm-I-yes. I remember," he managed.

"I used to feed them nuts," she continued. "But instead of eating them, they would just stuff them in their cheeks and run away Like this," she said, blowing out her cheeks.

"Anyway," she went on, "I got the idea of storing chakra in my cheeks, but my plan backfired." It was an absurd story, but Obito's attention was wholly focused on her puckered lips.

"So that's how I got these marks," she said. "They're ugly."

"No!" he exclaimed. "Um… I like… no," he couldn't say, helpless. He clamped his lips shut before he could do further damage. The red splotches on his cheeks spread at an alarming rate down his face, ears, neck.

"Thank you." She smiled. "Anyway, your ankle is fine… you're fine."

"Oh. Okay." Obito sat up too quickly, almost colliding with her nose. He stared at it, cross-eyed.

"Careful," she chided softly. "What were you doing here anyway?"

"I was practicing my Fireball jutsu and my eyes hurt because of all the smoke," he started saying as she brought up a hand to shield his eyes from the glaring sun. A cooling sensation. His eyelids fluttered back open and he felt as though he had just woken up from a good night's sleep. Their eyes met through the gaps between her fingers. "Um…" was the extent of his ability to conjugate. "So, my goggles," he ended lamely.

She clapped her hands together, making him jump. "I think I saw something over there."

They headed to the place where she had been harvesting cattails. She noticed his goggles first, bending over the tall grass. Obito gallantly sprang into action and as he reached down over her, he felt his chest brush against the warm back of the girl bent beneath him. She straightened and gazed at him over her shoulder. "Here," she murmured, holding out her hand.

He took her small, white hand in his. Without his knowing, his thumb wandered along the curve of her palm.

She tilted her head at him. "Your goggles," she said, smiling.

He dropped her hand as if burned, and mumbled something vaguely under his breath as his hand returned to its usual place on the back of his neck.

Silence.

Obito fished for the right words, but everything he drafted in his head sounded so artificial, so bookish. He wanted so desperately to say the right thing, but his tongue was unwilling to cooperate. "See you around?" he asked hopelessly. He could already see the reluctance cooling in her eyes; he could already hear the fake, perfunctory promises forming in her lips.

But her smile remained. Her entire bearing—the cheerful fold of her eyes, the gentle slope of her brow, the endearing way she angled her neck to look up at him though she was taller—exuded warmth and affection. He saw himself reflected in the pools of her eyes. "Okay," she agreed. "Let's go to the festival. It'll be fun."

He was already nodding his head emphatically.

* * *

"I'm sorry, I don't have anything nicer to wear," Rin greeted, fingering the hem of her skirt. She was wearing the same wrinkled clothes from the afternoon. Her black skirt, her grass-stained apron stood out in the crowd of colorful festival garb.

Obito ran his hands self-consciously down the fresh, new shirt he'd changed into. "You look fine," he said, willing the heat away from his cheeks.

"Thank you."

"I-" He bit his tongue. "I think you look nice," he reiterated shakily.

"Thank you."

They walked in silence for a while as Obito wracked his brain for something witty to say. A few times, he opened his mouth, sucked in a breath, and exhaled nothing but air. He'd spent hours rehearsing a script and all he had to show was hot air. With envy, he eyed the many couples chatting and laughing and holding hands. His own hands were clammy; they would probably disgust her. Speech choked to death in his throat. And laughter came easy only to fools according to the proverbs.

"Obito," she called, pulling him away from the crowded street. "Obito," she repeated as she guided him somewhere quiet.

They had fallen behind the main procession and watched from the top of the hill as the throng of colorful lanterns bobbed away and twinkled back into sight as a distant constellation. "Don't you want to join them?"

She shook her head.

Somehow, they made their way to the memorial stone. "My mother left me in a field when I was three. A farmer found me and gave me the name _Nohara_."

"Do you remember anything, you know… from before?"

"Not much. I remember that I was flying a kite that day. That the grass was taller than me. That it was sunny. She was singing," Rin said, her voice light and breezy. "And then I realized that she wasn't singing anymore. When I turned around, she was gone," Rin said, shrugging.

He wouldn't let himself be deceived. He inspected her face carefully, expecting to see some sign of sadness. But she simply responded to his gaze with a sunny smile; he turned his head hastily, committing her face to memory. There were no tears, but permanent traces of a harsh life written in the lines etched around her mouth, on her sun-kissed skin, in the shadows under her eyes. He remembered her scarred hands, the feel of her calluses running down his sensitive skin.

But still she smiled. And all these things that should have diminished her beauty made it more poignant, more enduring, more real and closer to life.

He looked down at his own hands—scarred like hers, calloused like hers. His own parents had abandoned him in their own way. Like her, he'd been taken into a home that wasn't truly his own. They were the same.

"I must have flown my kite for days, hoping she would see it and come find me," she continued. "But she didn't and I never saw her again."

"And your father? Surely someone must have looked for you?"

"Maybe. Who knows?" she said, tracing the name at the very top of the stone- _Senju Tobirama_. "Would it have made a difference?"

"I think so," Obito ventured to say. "You would have had a family. You wouldn't be alone."

"Maybe." She shrugged again. "Maybe not. I like to think that she left me there as an act of mercy. Maybe she thought leaving me there would give me a chance she couldn't provide. We were poor—I remember that much."

Obito glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, unable to look at her directly. One by one she was slowly working her way down the names on the stone as if she were a blind woman learning how to read. When she got to the long line of his dead, heroic clansmen (for there was no other kind of Uchiha), when her fingers ran along the grooves of the name _Morito_ , Obito said, "That's my grandfather."

Her fingers paused. "My parents aren't there," Obito remarked. After a moment, he shrugged casually. "My mom died having me. My dad died when I was five. Some disease. Something about tubes and roses."

"Tuberculosis?"

"Yeah, that's the one."

Her hands resumed their journey down the stone. "You must miss them," she said.

Obito shrugged again and traced the name of his grandfather, trying to feel something other than cool granite. "What's there to miss? All Uchiha are the same anyway. I'll probably end up here too. We Uchiha are rather good at that."

"Do you want to?" she asked. "Don't you want to do anything else?"

"But who doesn't want to be remembered?" He paused to gauge her reaction, but she remained where she was, pensive gaze directed towards the stone. "I can't be Hokage," he continued slowly. "Too bad. But I can make some kind of mark. All I have to do is die in the right place."

It was true. His dream of becoming Hokage had toppled with the realization that popularity was a requirement, not a consequence. He was no prodigy like Kakashi. He wasn't disciplined like Gai. He wasn't even a proper Uchiha since he'd run crying from all the clan trials designed to activate the Sharingan.

"Can I tell you a secret?" she asked quietly.

He nodded, silently thrilled by the way she leaned towards him.

"This memorial…" she started to say. Obito followed her eyes from the top down to the bottom where the name _Sarutobi Hiruzen_ was inscribed. "This stone is a replica."

"Really?" He reached again for his grandfather's name. Nothing had really changed, of course, but he couldn't help but feel disappointed nonetheless. "Who copied it?"

She responded with a wry smile. "The Uchiha, of course. They're rather good at that."

He huffed, unable to resist her smile. "What happened to the original?"

"The war. Danzo-sama had them reconstruct it afterwards."

"Oh, that's nice."

"I guess so," she mused, turning her head to face him. "But that's not my point. My point is that even this memorial stone can't last forever. After time, these names will just be letters on stone. Maybe someone will remember you. Maybe not. In the end, what do you owe to the future? What do you owe to yourself?"

She said all this in one burst and abruptly fell into silence, nibbling on her chapped lips. When he failed to respond, she pitched forward to peek anxiously at him around the curtain of hair that had fallen between them.

He was so charmed by her concern that he reached forward and gently tucked her hair back into place behind her ear. She tilted her face and smiled up at him. His hand slid to the back of her head as his thumb brushed the curve of her ear. It would be so easy to lean forward and close the short distance between them.

The moment he noticed, he blushed painfully to his own horror. But before he could pull away and burrow underground, she cupped his burning cheeks with cool fingertips and drew him in.

His entire perception narrowed to the warm, chapped lips on his own—touching, coaxing, moving, wanting. Her smile was warm and inviting when they parted. She murmured something he couldn't hear over the deafening noise of his own heartbeat. His only thought was that _she_ had reached for him, that _she_ had wanted him; he wasn't alone.

Her lips were red, drawing him in again like a magnet. Her hair was heavy in his hands as he brushed it over her bare shoulder. He couldn't stop. Everything he'd failed to say before escaped in the little prayers he pressed into her skin.

The next day, Leaf declared war on Rock. By the end of the month, all Leaf genin were out on the field.


	2. Winter

"Get down, motherfucker!"

For Obito, who had grown up in the prim and impeccably proper corner of Konoha known as the Uchiha district where coughing in front of the wrong person could warrant a formal censure—who, as an orphan, couldn't imagine having a mother let alone fucking one—this word was _shocking_. Enough to jolt him out of his frozen position and turn his scandalized face towards the smoking delinquent who had uttered the foulest thing he'd heard in all his eighteen years.

" _What_?" Obito squeaked.

A kunai skimmed his cheek and impaled the tree behind him.

"Get the fuck down!" the Hokage's son yelled, lunging forward and yanking on Obito's ankle. They fell hard onto a patch of brambles just as a barrage of shuriken hit the same tree with a resounding thud.

The Hokage's son spat out his cigarette. "You fucking idiot." Then he tore himself free of the thorns and flew at the enemy with a pair of glowing knives in his fists. Obito rolled himself upright, wincing as the cut on his cheek was ripped open by the branches, and scrambled to perform a jutsu—any jutsu.

But the Hokage's son was in the way. Obito struggled to keep the pocket of burning chakra in his throat as he desperately scanned the brawling trio of ninja for an opening. He was standing there with his thorny cheeks blown up like a pufferfish when he heard the light pitter patter of footsteps behind him. He choked back the unfinished jutsu and frantically ducked under the sword that came whistling at his neck.

One moment he was fending off a sword with a kunai, and the next he was being thrown forward and hitting the ground with his face. Dazed, he wondered who was pouring that high-pitched screech into his ears. Someone grabbed the back of his collar and pulled him roughly to his boneless feet. Obito blinked a few times to clear his foggy vision and immediately wished he hadn't.

The Hokage's son was angrily mouthing something that _looked_ extremely unpleasant. But the only thing coming out of his lips was spittle. That was odd. He'd been speaking so eloquently just a few moments before.

"What are you saying?" Obito asked, brows furrowed. "Why can't you talk?" Nothing. He stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. "Hello?" Still nothing. If there weren't going to be any aural consequences, then…

"Motherfucker?" Obito tried, tasting each individual letter.

The Hokage's son apparently decided that sign language was the way to go. His open hand flew into Obito's face. Hard. Sound came rushing back in, accompanied by a troupe of flashing lights and all the terrible pains that adrenaline had mercifully hidden. Nausea came too, folding Obito in half and forcing him to his hands and knees. He retched violently, voiding all the contents of his body, and continued to retch long after there was nothing more to eject.

"—standing there like a fucking deer!" Obito heard distantly above him as he resigned himself to convulsing for the remainder of his miserable life. He was fairly certain someone—probably an Akimichi—was attacking his head with a hammer. At least he was too exhausted to cry.

"Don't fucking cry," the Hokage's son muttered irritably. "Goddammit." Another cigarette materialized in his mouth, which he lit with a spark of chakra. He exhaled a noxious plume of smoke as he examined the pitiful sight before him. "Look, kid. I'm sorry for slapping you—and for yelling—but you were high off your rocker." He paused to nudge Obito with his foot. "You alright?"

Obito, still struggling to catch his breath, tried raising a thumbs up but he couldn't quite figure out where _up_ was. So he settled on grimacing as politely as he could.

"Yeah, you're full of shit. C'mon, kid. There's a cute medic nin back at camp," the Hokage's son said, digging his hands under Obito's armpits and scooping him out of his vomit.

"Don't," Obito whimpered as he was flung over a hard shoulder like a sack of rice.

"What was that now?"

"Her name is Rin and she's _my_ girlfriend. An' we were all in the same class so stop calling me _kid_ ," Obito slurred. He almost choked on the stench of stale tobacco and sweat clinging to the man carrying him.

"Oh." The Hokage's son sounded genuinely surprised. "What was your name again?"

"Obito. Ucha Tobito an I'm gon take your dad's job one day."

The shoulder supporting Obito's gut stiffened before its owner replied shortly, "My _name_ is Asuma and my old man's been dead in the ground for a while. You can join him there with that fucking deer act." He cleared his throat and muttered, "But I guess if you survive your own stupidity, you can come by my hookah lounge. That's where I'll be when this is all over." His hand waved vaguely at a charred corpse leaning against a tree which bobbed cheerfully in and out of Obito's blurry vision. "Hopefully not there, you know?"

With the gravel cleared from his throat, the Hokage's son- _Asuma_ , Obito reminded himself-sounded kinder. Younger, maybe. "Hookah?" he wondered aloud as his brain sluggishly processed Asuma's words.

"Good shit, man."

"Oh," Obito mumbled agreeably. Then he fainted.

* * *

We didn't know it at the time, but the first impressions we made on our first day in our first year left indelible marks on the way we were perceived for the rest of our lives. Most of us were too shy to stand out, but we all remembered how Obito had acted that day.

He was different from the very beginning. We couldn't help but notice the way he kept tugging irritably at his high collar, the way he squirmed in his new shoes. We stared enviously at the shiny new goggles dangling from his ungrateful neck. We saw the crisp, ironed folds in his new shirt. Our shoes were falling apart. We were dirty, wrinkled, threadbare in comparison. And Obito just looked like another spoiled clan brat.

They lined us up and had us run a circular track. Obito was one of the only ones who ran by himself. He was a quick runner and almost immediately opened twenty, thirty, forty meters between him and the rest of us. But truth be told, Obito ran alone because no one wanted to run with him. The only student ahead of him was Kakashi, who ran alone simply because no one could keep up with his effortless glide.

We all watched from the back, giggling as Obito huffed and puffed and sweated like a pig, spoiling his new clothes with his wild charge as he tried in vain to catch up to Kakashi. It wasn't even close. In the end, Kakashi sailed blithely through the finish line, slowed to a jog, and yawned. A book materialized into his hands as he strolled around, supremely unaffected by the wheezing noises coming from the clan brat.

Obito shuffled painfully past the finish line and fell on the grass, wheezing and clutching his side. The rest of us came in at a leisurely pace, not wanting to look so stupidly desperate like Obito.

As soon as the last straggler made it across, they took us to a field and instructed us to divide ourselves into two teams for a game of dodgeball. We looked skeptically at the audience of masked, hooded figures observing us from the side. But Asuma and Kakashi just shrugged and started a game of rock-paper-scissors. Most of us pretended not to be too interested in the picking process and we chatted amongst ourselves in hushed tones as we waited. Mostly about Obito.

"Look," someone whispered, "he's so confident he's gonna be picked first."

"He's so full of himself," another muttered.

It was true. Obito was standing with his hands on his hips, face beaming as he gazed expectantly at Kakashi and Asuma. His face was flushed and he was panting a bit. We knew it was left over from the run, but he looked like a dog begging for a treat.

Kakashi won first pick. He folded his arms and considered each of us in turn. Even the boys who'd been kicking pebbles at the girls stopped and waited. His eyes lingered on Obito who grinned even wider and began rocking back and forth impatiently on the balls of his feet. Still looking at Obito, Kakashi opened his mouth and called, "Kurenai."

Kurenai blushed. Asuma scowled. The girls giggled. The boys silently prayed Kakashi would pick them too. But the real prize was Obito's expression when Kakashi raised an eyebrow at him and returned to his book. Only then did the smile slide off Obito's face. His mouth quivered and his lower lip jutted out like a big, fat slug to soak up the sudden storm of tears and snot.

Obito wasn't the second pick. Nor the third. Nor the fourth. Nor the fifth, sixth, seventh. And so on and so forth until Obito was standing by himself, glaring at us with red, watery eyes. He looked round and round, searching every face for sympathy. But Asuma crossed his arms and very deliberately continued to smile in Kurenai's direction; Kakashi's face remained hidden behind his book.

Finally, one of the hooded figures came to prod Obito's trembling back, pushing him forward until he was within the general radius of Asuma's team. Apparently satisfied, the hooded person turned and left Obito to look timidly at his unfortunate teammates who were huddling closer together to form an unbreachable wall.

Asuma sighed and muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like "Crybaby."

Someone snickered. Obito stiffened. We all watched him carefully to see if he would start crying. Even Kakashi poked his head out of his book. And so we all saw Obito bite his lip and look fiercely up at the sky. But it was all in vain. As soon as the first tear rolled down his cheek, Obito blushed a deep red and kicked the ground.

Asuma shook his head.

Kakashi's team won.

* * *

She was there when he awoke, carding a gentle hand through his hair. "He's nice," she remarked.

"Who?" Obito asked a bit too quickly and loudly, bolting upright. He immediately regretted the woozy feeling that overcome him.

"Your friend."

He stared at her blankly.

"Asuma," she supplied.

"I—yeah. He's nice," he mumbled, looking away.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Nothing… You weren't there. You don't know-" he choked on the thought. _Crybaby_. It was all so stupid and childish. "Never mind." Obito blinked hard to clear the despicable tears forming in his eyes. Her hand withdrew from his hair and he just barely caught himself trying to catch her before she left him.

But she didn't, and her hand lit up with a familiar chakra that illuminated her smile. "It's okay," she whispered. "You can tell me when you're ready." It wasn't just her glowing hand that brought him relief.

"I-okay."


End file.
